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Ellen Gallagher on rot, race and the persistence of life at the Power Plant

A big black box sits lakeside at Harbourfront Centre, a ramp up to its only door framed by golden rails. Inside, it’s hot — black paint, July humidity and a conspicuous lack of shade mix poorly — and when the door shuts behind you, the darkness isn’t the only thing closing in. Airless and confining, the smothering space contains Osedax, a 2010 work by the American artist Ellen Gallagher, which unfurls on two of the box’s four walls: A video of a fiery shipwreck on one, gorgeous watery stains of colour on the other.

It hints at Abstract Expression and marine microbiology all at once — not a stretch, maybe, for an artist from Rhode Island who once spent a college semester at sea studying oceanic microclimates. More important, though, is that box: Oceanic journeys have always carried freight, literal and otherwise, and the Middle Passage — a term used for the most awful of those voyages, ferrying Africans to faraway colonies to be sold as slaves — is one of Gallagher’s central concerns.

In that dank space where no light gets in, there might be a metaphor for the hold of a slaving ship, where images of disaster and hope play in the mind. Its title darkens further the tale: Osedax are tiny worms that dwell on the sea bottom, feeding on what drifts to the depths. Throughout the Middle Passage, human meals were plentiful and not accidental; slavers often cast overboard the sick and weak among their cargo, sometimes for the insurance money.

There’s a danger here of such dark ideas devolving — justifiably, let’s add — into a screed. Among the litany of humanity’s darkest moments, the Middle Passage ranks right at the top, the fractures it begat still deepening all around us. Gallagher, though, is no polemicist. Her works here simmer with poetic complexity, absurdist humour and a ravishing beauty.

On the second floor of the Power Plant you’ll find the works that connect most directly to Osedax, a suite of paintings on grids of lined paper, mostly in an inviting sea-foam green. But don’t miss the little collage at the outset, where the story begins. A black-and-white image of the Great Temple of Ramses II, the Egyptian king, is fitted with a sparkly spaceship beaming up a crowd of Africans below. It’s a direct reference to Sun Ra’s 1973 filmSpace is the Place, in which African-Americans escape the oppression of Earth for outer space.

The definitive epic of Afro-Futurism, a utopian sci-fi fantasy genre that gained a new high-profile chapter with the arrival of Black Panther this year, Space is the Place helped give life to dreams of freedom in the 1970s. As Black culture was fetishized in the popular imagination, Black people still suffered routine oppression and marginalization. Afro-Futurism was escapist fantasy with political undertones — a subculture predicated on the lust for unachievable freedoms, meant for Black audiences alone.

What does any of this have to do with the lush aquamarine panels that line those upper galleries? Well, a lot. Gallagher’s paintings have always skirted the line between abstract and figurative, her subtle defiance of category and type registering a formal complaint against the narrow take that history, and art history, has always told.

It put me in mind of the late Toronto painter Denyse Thomasos, for whom the visceral techniques of abstraction remained inadequate for the specific stories she wanted to tell about Black imprisonment and the violence of the state. That darkly poignant space in between — rejecting convention, declaring themselves — is their shared ground, though Gallagher addresses history’s offhand exclusions in sharp, specific ways that belie her works’ soft beauty.

Paintings, on closer view, deepen with specifics: the scattered fragments of Dew Breaker transform into black bodies thrown overboard in a violent arc, the explosive churn of Whale Fall — a marine biology term for whale carcasses that tumble into the deep among the Osedax — morphs into a pale leviathan breathing its last. Others, though, offer a strange kind of hope: In Aquajujidsu, black shards coalesce into a face, peacefully emerging.

Here, another Afro-Futurist myth takes hold: Drexciya, the Black Atlantis, where the unborn infants of pregnant slaves thrown into the sea are born underwater and adapt to live there, creating a Black utopia out of reach of the surface world’s cruelties. (Tying it together: Hydropoly Spores, a seascape of creeping amoeba here named after a song by the Detroit Afro-futurist band Drexciya, named for the myth. Legend has it the band bought a star, dreaming of a Space is the Place-style escape.)

Gallagher’s work — nuanced, dreamy, as hopeful as it is dark — relies on ideas of new life emerging from violent death. I don’t want to call it optimistic, though it does make room if not exactly for hope, then a future outside deeply carved boundaries. Downstairs, a selection of slick black paintings offer issue a cheeky critique of art history again: Using Russian Suprematist (note the term, self-anointed) Kazimir Malevich as a target, Gallagher impugns early Modernism’s self-assigned purities with her own take on his Black Square, believed to be the first-ever monochrome abstraction.

Her series is an array of shimmering black panels with amoeba-like shapes carved deep into their hides; she calls them Negroes Battling in a Cave, black humour if there ever was, but it’s not just a dark joke. Gallagher’s works are a denial of simplistic ideas of purity — remember the inky abstractions of Osedax, just outside? — which she replaces with the complex reality they deny.

That one’s surely for the art nerds, though, and nearby, Gallagher roots things in a more universally knowable ground. In the 1960s in New Orleans, an elevated expressway sliced through the downtown Treme neighbourhood — sound familiar, Toronto? — taking two centuries’ worth of history along with it. That it was Black history — the Claiborne corridor, now under the I10, was the oldest African-American business district in the U.S. — wouldn’t seem a coincidence given the times, as urban-renewal schemes across the U.S. seemed to match up along racial lines (Chicago’s Robert Taylor public housing projects displaced thousands of Blacks; Robert Moses’s Bronx-Queens Expressway, expropriated the homes of just as many in New York).

Conflating Modernism’s utopian notion of clean slates with class warfare isn’t a new idea, nor is it strictly an American one (Nathan Phillips Square, that unforgiving plinth of concrete baking in the hot Toronto sun, serves as an outsize tombstone for the Ward, the city’s historic cradle of urban diversity). Gallagher’s take, the sprawlingly immersive Highway Gothic, made last year, is visceral pushback, a tangle of histories and images to negotiate in space.

Tapestry-like bolts of canvas and celluloid dangle from the ceiling, festooned with cyanotypes, creating a blue jungle of image and material. A pair of films unspool on vacant patches of fabric, of a black man navigating the concrete morass if the I10 from above and, by boat, from below. It imbues the scene with an urgency of overlooked scale — Modernist urban schemes considered structures, not people, in their radical makeover strategies — and links all of Gallagher’s work together.

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If you can read Modernity as a divisive force — colonialism being the thin edge of its unforgiving wedge — then you can see Gallagher’s project as a gathering-up of what it pushed aside. Difference and complexity were the victims of its single-minded advance, and here, in the tangle of Highway Gothic, Gallagher builds it back in: Neutral forms float in space alongside micro-organisms and the rot of Louisiana swamp — the abstract made abject, infused with visceral reality. More than anything, the scene is fecund — a disaster of death and carnage feeding new life.

The echo of Drexciya seems clear here, as does, perhaps, the overarching theme: That culture, and indeed life, is not built from the top down, but the deep rot down below from which new life can spring.

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